Even before the signing of the Prague declaration on October 6, 2022, Nagorno-Karabakh could have certainly been saved, preserving the structure that existed at that time. The second president of Armenia and the candidate for prime minister of the "Armenia" bloc, Robert Kocharyan, stated this in an interview with the Russian RBC television.

According to him, the incumbent authorities of Armenia have a very simple scheme by which they explain what happened in Karabakh: "There were Russian peacekeepers there, why didn't they protect the Armenians?"

Kocharyan added that Nagorno-Karabakh was lost because on October 6, 2022, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, without consulting Russia, signed a statement recognizing Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan.

"Russian peacekeepers were ensuring the vital activity of Karabakh. It was a very dilapidated structure, because it was not enshrined in a UN Security Council resolution, there were no mechanisms for enforcing peace. That is, the model was such that under the auspices of Russia, the president of Azerbaijan and the prime minister of Armenia had agreed to the presence of [Russian] peacekeepers. But as soon as one of the parties left that structure, it collapsed,” Kocharyan noted.

According to him, Armenia left that structure through negotiations in Prague, and then announced: “If you want, come to an agreement with Azerbaijan, the Karabakh issue is no longer mine.”

The ex-president and prime ministerial candidate said that Armenia’s authorities very successfully managed to shift the blame on Russia, and from a propaganda point of view, everything worked.

“If Azerbaijan had plans to take over all of Karabakh, then why was Baku building an airport in the city of Fizuli and investing a lot of money in it? Before the handover of Karabakh, Baku built a road, tunnels, overpasses, and other things leading from Fizuli to Shushi [city]. If they were sure that they would succeed, why were they investing such resources? Azerbaijan had calculated the long-term prospects of that structure,” Kocharyan said.

In his opinion, Armenia acted short-sightedly at that time. Kocharyan recalled that it was a period when Russia had certain failures on the Ukrainian front.

“I think Armenia’s authorities were either convinced, or it seemed to them that everything was falling apart there, Russia was getting stuck in insurmountable problems, and this was exactly the time to ‘jump out’ of those agreements,” Kocharyan said.

In his assessment, this was the direct motivation of the Armenian authorities, in which they were mistaken, and the price was paid by 120,000 Armenian residents of Nagorno-Karabakh who became refugees.

“Now they are living hard in Armenia, some programs are being implemented for them, some funds are being allocated, but they are clearly not enough. I think that the [Armenian] authorities are doing everything so that they [i.e. the displaced Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians] do not stay here [in Armenia]. Some of them have already left, some—not yet. The signature of one person and the absolutely wrong perception of the geopolitical situation turned into both a miscalculation and deliberate actions, and we got this tragedy,” Robert Kocharyan noted.

He reiterated that he is the only president of Armenia during whose term of office there was not even a medium-scale border incident. The second president noted that the Armenian authorities were actively negotiating with Azerbaijan at that time and were actively moving forward in the negotiation process.

“The fact that there will be a war with my arrival [in power again] is being spoken by a person [i.e. Pashinyan], who with his policy has brought the matter to three wars, surrendering more than 200 square kilometers of Armenia’s sovereign territory. This person has also provoked the [recent] Karabakh war,” Robert Kocharyan concluded.